You don’t know where to begin. Are you off your meds, skipper? Would be a good starting place, if a wee bit tactless: Have you cleared this with the military? Might be another. Liz isn’t simply not going by the book, she’s just about throwing it in the shredder. Finally, you clear your throat. “Aye, skipper. Isn’t this a bit, kind of, irregular?”
The giggle that blasts out of Davey’s phone nearly makes you drop it in the cereal bowl. “You just noticed? How perceptive of you!” She takes a moment to collect herself. “Sorry, Sue, we’re a bit stressed around here right now. The situation is, ah, at least as serious as the possibilities I outlined to you yesterday. I have in my hand a written letter from the chief constable—typed on a manual typewriter—citing his orders from the minister of justice—which were handwritten—invoking the Civil Contingencies Act. It’s fall-out from yesterday. Have you got that? This time the shit’s really going to hit the fan…”
At the local Tesco you find yourself in the automatic checkout aisle behind two other officers who you know by sight. Your hand-baskets are full of mobies. You all carefully avoid making eye contact with one another, but you can’t help noticing that one of them is also stocking up on water bottles.
You’re not that slow on the uptake; before you left home you washed out your backpack hydration system, the one you use for football matches, and filled it with freshly filtered water: And you made sure to give Davey an extralarge packed lunch, and five times as much bus fare as he’s likely to need to get home. He’s wearing his good shoes and has a spare pair of socks and a dog-eared old A-Z in his pack with gran’s address and a couple of other safe houses marked in red crayon—just in case. Liz Kavanaugh seems to think it’s going to be manageable, but paper doesn’t fail when the critical infrastructure goes down. About the only reason you don’t crack and put the bairn on a train to see his uncle in Liverpool is the worry that it might break down or get lost in the middle of nowhere. Which might be worse. Wouldn’t it?
After you drop five of the six cheap mobies off with Inspector Long, he gives you two more anonymous cereal-packet phones to carry, along with a long handwritten list of phone numbers and names. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out it’s a skeletal org chart, division heads and support units etched in hard black pencil. So you go downstairs and draw out a car—unsurprisingly, almost everything with wheels that turn is already on the road, somewhere—then head over to Meadowplace Road to find the inspector.
What you find at the station is something like an ants’ nest that’s been doused in paraffin but not yet set alight. There’s a frazzled constable on the front desk, and he’s splitting his time between turning MOPs away—“come back tomorrow, we’re too busy to take complaints right now” (which is just not how it’s done)—and grilling every uniform who comes in late. He sees you immediately. “Sergeant Smith? You got any numbers for me, miss?”
You plonk your ad hoc phone book on the blotter in front of him. “Is this what you’re after? I cannae let you keep it—it’s for Inspector Kavanaugh.”
“Just give me a minute…” He goes over it with a pen, copying lines into the gaps on his own list. “We’re not to use the photocopiers, the chief said. Not till they’ve been vetted by ICE.”
You take a deep breath. Well, if that’s how it is…“There’s a team meeting on the Hayek Associates job. You know where it is? I’m due there.”
“Room 204.” He glances up. “I havenae seen the inspector yet, miss. You go up there, and I’ll send someone up with yer list when I’m through with it.”
You thank him and head for the staircase. On your way through the office you notice that the monitors are all turned to face the walls and there’s an unusual clattering, thudding noise—someone’s wheeched out a metal box with a keyboard on the front of it and they’re banging the keys like they’re wee trip-hammers. There’s a sheet of paper sticking out the top, and it vibrates whenever they hit it: a typewriter? Phones are ringing everywhere, the bleeping of cheap no-name mobies, and there’s a big red plastic thing with a rotary dial on the front on the duty sergeant’s desk, like something out of an Agatha Christie video. Jesus, you think, if we’re knocked back into the twentieth century, how’re we going to know what to charge the customers with? It’s a scary thought: The succession of criminal justice acts that the old British government passed, and then the revised justice acts since independence, replaced the old catch-all offences like “breach of the peace” with a huge array of very specific charges (“being aggressive in charge of a Segway or similar scooter after midnight in a residential area”), such that you really need the expert system on your phone to figure out precisely how to throw the charge book at them. Never mind the fact that the station doesn’t have a bloody paper ledger anymore and you can’t actually book a customer into the cells without a worki…
You slip in the back of room 204 and find it’s already crowded. You’ve seen the faces before, at last week’s video conference—this time they’re all present and correct and not wearing their goggles. Verity looks royally fucked-off about something or other, and the detective suits aren’t looking too happy either. And there are others present—what looks like the whole of the murder team from St. Leonard’s, who were working on the Pilton case, chasing Liz’s chimerical blacknet. Full house. Verity glares directly at you. “I believe you’ve got a phone for me, Sergeant?”
“Certainly, sir.” You walk right on up to the front and hand it to him, along with its box. “The front desk is copying the phone book for you. By hand.”
His cheek twitches as he turns the gadget over in his hands. “I see a camera.” He mimes snapping a shot as he turns to Bill the Suit. “Tell ’em to photograph the pages and text me the picture. That’ll do for now. Get the list typed up and reshoot it, then send it to one of those online OCR services.” Bill looks shocked. “Go on! If they’re Googling all the civilian traffic in Scotland, it’s too late, already.” Behind you, the door opens again; you glance round and recognize Liz Kavanaugh. “Ah, good,” rasps Verity, as Bill heads for the door to engage in his amateur photography. “I was wondering when you’d get here!”
“Yes, well, I was regrettably delayed.” Liz looks at you pointedly. “You’ve got a phone for me?” You hand the mobie over. She takes it and goes over to the vacant chair next to Verity. “I had to stop to get eyeball confirmation of a murder victim’s ID.”
“Another…?” Verity’s eyebrows go up. “Is it connected?”
“Definitely.” Liz grins like a skull.
“Well, shite. If you’ll pardon my French.” Verity doesn’t hold with bad language, which makes him something of an anomaly north of the border. “Who is it this time?”
“Wayne Richardson, a Hayek Associates’ employee who has been helping with our investigations this past week.” She nods at you, and you tense. “He was the source of the original crime report and the first indication that, uh, Nigel MacDonald was missing. I caught up with our two external investigators, Mr. Reed and Ms. Barnaby, and they confirmed his identity.”
“That makes it, what? Four this week?”
“Three, sir,” Liz says firmly. “Because Nigel MacDonald doesn’t exist.”
Verity rolls his eyes. “Explain.”
“Sir.” Liz faces the roomful of faces. “There’s a body in Pilton. Last night, there was another body in Strathclyde—looked like a foreign-exchange student who’d gone for a midnight walk on the Clockwork Orange tracks, except his blood alcohol was zero, serum cortisol was sky-high, and there were other physical signs of stress—and, earlier in the day, he’d tried to stab a person of interest in my other case. This morning Wayne Richardson of Hayek Associates shows up dead: hit and run, apparently on his way to work, except that the hit and run in question was a taxi under remote drive authority by persons unknown.” There’s an audible wave of angry muttering from around the room. “These events are connected to an alleged kidnapping down south the day before yesterday, to yesterday’s fun and games involving Europol, a warehouse in Leith, and a bunch of very expensive servers”—you can see Verity wincing at the memory—“and this morning’s major incident alert and to the flat on the meadows with a satellite uplink on the roof we did over earlier in the week, so if anyone hasn’t got the message already, if you’ve got a PDA, or an official phone, or a personal phone you owned more than twenty-four hours ago, switch the bloody thing off right now.”